ANCIENT LEGENDS TELL of a great continent now lost under the sea. Sanskrit tradition calls the continent ‘Rutas’ and says that it sank under the Indian Ocean. Tamil writings recorded on palm tree bark tell of a giant land mass that connected southern India to Australia. All across the islands of the Pacific Ocean there are legends of a massive continent that was the birthplace of Man and which sank under the waves. This lost land we now refer to as ‘Mu’ or ‘Lemuria’. James Churchward, an Anglo-American traveller, wrote the first accounts of Mu legend. He said he was taught Mankind’s original tongue, a dialect called ‘Naacal’, by an Indian priest. This holy man then showed him some old stone tablets hidden in a temple, written in this ancient language. These tablets explained that Mu was a continent in the Pacific Ocean. Placed just below the equator, it was 5,000 miles long and 3,000 miles wide. The tablets said that Mankind had appeared on Mu two million years ago, and a highly advanced society of 64 million people had developed on the island before they were all but wiped out by a huge volcanic eruption.

Around the same time as Churchward was publicising his legend and tradition-based theory, another more scientific group were advancing the idea of a lost land. Naturalists and zoologists who followed and believed Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution were finding it particularly difficult to explain the widespread existence of lemurs. If these animals had all descended from a common ancestor, as Darwin suggested, then there must have once been a land link between these areas. One of Darwin’s followers, an English zoologist called Philip L. Schlater, proposed the name ‘Lemuria’ for this invented sunken land bridge.

As science has progressed since Darwin’s time, zoologists can now account for the wide distribution of the lemur family without resorting to creating ideas of ancient missing land masses. But at the same time, genetic discoveries have proven that, because of a massive natural catastrophe that almost induced human extinction, all of Mankind originally stems from a small pool of biological variations.